“She is a ghost,” he tells the jury, his voice booming with the same false righteousness he used to use at Sunday dinners when he wanted the roast passed faster. “Ask anybody in this county. Ask the neighbors. Ask the hardware store, the church office, the postmaster. Elena Vance hasn’t lived among us in fifteen years. She claims she works for some logistics group in Washington, but there is no office. There is no website. There’s no payroll trail, no real company, no honest work. She has spent her whole life living off scraps my wife threw her. And now that her mother is dead, she’s trying to bleed the estate dry.”
He turns toward the jury on the word dead, letting it hang there. He knows how to use grief as punctuation.